Maria Angelova came to Lunita to lead a retreat and ended up receiving one. She wrote the whole story on her own site, The Art of Being: What the Jungle Taught Me, and gave us her blessing to retell part of it here. What follows is our telling; the full account, the spiders included, is hers.
A retreat that changed shape
Maria found Lunita while searching for a venue and, by her own account, her first reaction to the word jungle was a firm no. Twenty years earlier the same word had disqualified a retreat she was considering. This time the site kept pulling her back, a call with Nico turned into a theme, The Art of Being, and a group retreat began to take form.
Then the group did not. Dates failed for some, the absence of air conditioning put off others, and what remained was Maria and one close friend. The friend asked the question that turned the week: what if the retreat were private, and for Maria too? A leader who has spent a decade holding space for others booked a week of being held.
What a private week here looks like
The two of them had the property to themselves: a casita each, the pool, the hammocks over the water, and the space between things that Maria writes about at length, meals without a clock, conversations without a phone, afternoons with nothing scheduled. She describes the property as built around the jungle rather than cleared from it, which is exactly what we intended, and she describes the first night as loud with life and hard to sleep through, which is also true. By the second night the sound had become the sound of the place.
The ceremonies were arranged around them: a blessing and a four elements ceremony with copal, held by a facilitator in his sixties who carries the tradition from his father; a temazcal, which she had never heard of before finding Lunita and could not wait to try; and a day at a private cenote with a local healer, working with water and with what she calls womb energy. Her account of the thunder that arrived twice, exactly as the copal cleansing began, is worth reading in her own words.
What she took home
Maria has practiced presence for ten years and teaches it for a living, so the thing she reports most plainly is that she still went quieter than she expected. The facilitator's advice for her everyday life was two words, intention and gratitude, which she already lived by; sometimes, she writes, we travel a long way to be reminded of what we know. The deeper lesson was surrender: a retreat that did not go to plan became one she could not have planned, and the person who usually curates the experience got to receive it.
Her own summary of the whole week is a sentence we will not improve on: "Saying yes to yourself, creating enough space and quiet to hear yourself."
Why we are sharing it
Because it describes, better than we can, what a personal retreat at Lunita is for: days built around one or two people rather than a group, ceremonies arranged around them rather than the other way round, and enough unclaimed time for the place to do its work. Maria's version had a temazcal, a cenote, two ceremonies and a friend; yours can be shaped differently. Our guides to what to expect in a temazcal and to coming alone cover the practical side.
Read the full story, with her photographs, on Maria's blog, and find her work at rebelliousstudio.com. She has said there will be a next time; we will be glad to host it.